Science
It Fought to Save the Whales. Can Greenpeace Save Itself?
Greenpeace is among the most well-known environmental organizations in the world, the result of more than 50 years of headline-grabbing protest tactics.
Its activists have confronted whaling ships on the high seas. They’ve hung banners from the Eiffel Tower. They’ve occupied oil rigs. A (fictional) activist even sailed with Greenpeace in an episode of “Seinfeld,” in hopes of capturing Elaine’s heart.
Now, Greenpeace’s very existence is under threat: A lawsuit seeks at least $300 million in damages. Greenpeace has said such a loss in court could force it to shut down its American offices. In the coming days, a jury is expected to render its verdict.
The lawsuit is over Greenpeace’s role in protests a decade ago against a pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. The pipeline’s owner, Energy Transfer, says Greenpeace enabled illegal attacks on the project and led a “vast, malicious publicity campaign” that cost the company money.
Greenpeace says that it played only a minor, peaceful role in the Indigenous-led protest, and that the lawsuit’s real aim is to limit free speech not just at the organization, but also across America, by raising the specter of expensive court fights.
The suit comes at a time of immense challenges for the entire environmental movement. Climate change is making storms, floods and wildfires more frequent and more dangerous. The Trump administration has commenced a historic effort to overturn decades of environmental protections. Many of the movement’s most significant achievements over the past half-century are at risk.
And in recent years the potential costs of protest have already risen.
The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law has tracked a wave of bills proposed since 2017 that toughen penalties against protesters. Many became law in the wake of the demonstrations against the pipeline at the center of the Greenpeace case (the Dakota Access Pipeline) and also the Black Lives Matter movement, which rose to prominence after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 by a police officer in Minnesota. More recently, the Trump administration has moved to deport international students who protested the war in Gaza.
Sushma Raman, interim executive director of Greenpeace USA, has called the trial in North Dakota “a critical test of the future of the First Amendment.”
Energy Transfer, one of the biggest pipeline companies in the country, has said that the lawsuit is over illegal conduct, not free speech. “It is about them not following the law,” the company said in a statement.
Founded in Vancouver in 1971, Greenpeace was hugely successful early on at what is now called “branding,” with its catchy name and daredevil stunts. But it has also faced major challenges: infighting, missteps, legal battles and questions about how to widen its base and remain relevant as it became an institution.
The larger environmental movement has grown, but also has struggled to gain attention in an increasingly fractured media landscape and as it has pivoted to the issue of climate change, which can be less tangible than previous targets of activism, like say opposing logging or oil-drilling in specific places.
“What they made their name on was the media spectacle, especially the ability to conduct a high-profile action that requires incredible tactical organization,” said Frank Zelko, a history professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and the author of “Make It a Green Peace! The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism.” That became “less efficacious” over time, he said, as competition for eyeballs grew and spectacular images, whether real or not, abound.
Greenpeace was founded as an offshoot of the Sierra Club based on the principles of ecology and anti-militarism. But pulling off daring stunts in pursuit of those principles, while also operating as a worldwide professional network, has always been a delicate balancing act.
After friction and fights for control of the organization in the late 1970s, Greenpeace International was established in the Netherlands as the head office, coordinating the activities of independent Greenpeace offices around the world, including Greenpeace USA.
The activities of its American branch are at the center of the lawsuit. Greenpeace International says its role was limited to signing one open letter. Greenpeace International has also countersued Energy Transfer in the Netherlands, seeking to recoup its legal costs under European laws that essentially allow it to challenge the Energy Transfer lawsuit as a form of harassment.
In Greenpeace’s Washington office, the Energy Transfer case has contributed to turbulence in the group’s highest levels.
In early 2023, the organization celebrated the appointment of Ebony Twilley Martin as sole executive director, calling Ms. Twilley Martin the first Black woman to be the sole director of a legacy U.S. environmental nonprofit. But she left that role just 16 months later, a development that two people familiar with the matter said was in part over disagreements about whether to agree to a settlement with Energy Transfer.
Born in ’60s upheaval
Greenpeace was born out of a moment of fear and upheaval, amid the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, acid rain and smog blanketing cities. Rex Weyler, 77, an early member, chronicled the history in his 2004 book “Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists and Visionaries Changed the World.”
In Vancouver, Mr. Weyler met Bob Hunter, a columnist for The Vancouver Sun, and Dorothy and Irving Stowe, older Quakers who had left the United States in protest over war taxes and weapons testing. They were meeting like-minded people who saw a need for an ecology movement that would employ nonviolent direct action, following the examples of Mohandas K. Gandhi in India and the civil rights movement in the United States.
They would soon become an offshoot of a more traditional environmental group, the Sierra Club, after a disagreement over protest tactics.
Their first campaign was a mission to block U.S. nuclear weapons tests on Amchitka, a volcanic island in Alaska. An idea this group had floated within the Sierra Club — to sail a boat to stop the bomb — had been reported in The Vancouver Sun, though the head office of Sierra Club in San Francisco had not approved that plan.
“The Sierra Club was not amused when they saw this story, because they said, ‘You know, a lot of our members are just tree-huggers, and they don’t care about nuclear disarmament,’” said Robert Stowe, son of Dorothy and Irving and a behavior neurologist. “Had the Sierra Club agreed to do this, Greenpeace could probably never have been founded.”
The name Greenpeace came up during a planning meeting, when Irving Stowe said “peace” at the end of the gathering and another activist, Bill Darnell, replied offhandedly, “Make it a green peace.”
“Greenpeace” was emblazoned on the fishing boat they used. Irving Stowe organized a concert by Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Phil Ochs to raise money for the trip.
The boat set sail in September 1971. The Coast Guard intercepted it, and the vessel never reached Amchitka. But the stunt garnered considerable public attention, a core part of the group’s strategy in the years since.
‘Save the whales’ era
Greenpeace’s next campaign is perhaps its most well known: saving the whales.
The idea came from Paul Spong, who had studied orca whales and argued that the highly intelligent creatures were being hunted to extinction. That led to a copiously documented, dramatic sailing expedition to confront Soviet whaling ships.
A worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling has been in place since 1986. Greenpeace and other groups who worked on the issue have claimed it as a major victory.
The group also tried to stop seal hunting in northern Canada, a controversial move that alienated a large number of residents, including in Indigenous communities. Greenpeace Canada apologized to the Inuit people for the impacts of the campaign in 2014, and the organization said it did not oppose small-scale subsistence hunting.
The ship Rainbow Warrior, a crucial vessel in the anti-whaling campaign, was added to the fleet in 1978. That ship was protesting French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1985 when it was bombed by agents for the French spy agency D.G.S.E., killing Fernando Pereira, a photographer, and igniting international outrage.
France later apologized and was ordered to pay $8 million in damages to Greenpeace, and reached a separate settlement with Mr. Pereira’s family.
A new Rainbow Warrior is now one of three Greenpeace vessels in operation. It is sailing this month in the Marshall Islands to “elevate calls for nuclear and climate justice,” the group said, and to support research on the effects of past nuclear weapons testing.
Growing pains
By the 1990s, Greenpeace’s attention-grabbing environmentalism was capturing the imagination of a new generation of people like Valentina Stackl, 39, who learned of its exploits as a girl in Europe. She worked with Greenpeace USA from 2019 to 2023.
“The idea of Greenpeace ships, and save the whales and hanging off a bridge or something like that was truly magical,” she said. “And on the best days Greenpeace really was like that. Of course, there’s also the slog of the day-to-day that is less sparkly.”
One constant concern was fund-raising: Greenpeace USA is largely funded by individual donations, which can fluctuate. Tax filings show its revenue has been stable in recent years.
The group’s priorities shifted to climate and how to incorporate what is known as “environmental justice,” the fact that pollution and other environmental hazards often disproportionally affect poor and minority areas. The historically mostly white and male-dominated organization had to grapple with how to increasingly collaborate with a diverse range of other groups. And it had to reckon with historical tensions with Indigenous communities over its whaling and sealing campaigns, as well as other missteps.
One of those mistakes occurred in Peru in 2014, when there was an uproar over a Greenpeace action that damaged the Nazca lines, ancient man-made patterns etched in the desert. Activists from Greenpeace Germany entered the restricted area to place a protest message about renewable energy. The Peruvian cultural minister called it an act of “stupidity” that had “co-opted part of the identity of our heritage.”
The organization apologized, and the episode prompted Greenpeace USA to adopt a formal policy on interactions with Indigenous communities, according to Rolf Skar, the group’s campaigns director. In short, Greenpeace would not get involved in struggles led by Indigenous people unless specifically asked to do so.
That policy has come up in this month’s trial in North Dakota. Greenpeace argued that it had offered support in the Dakota Access Pipeline protest only after it was asked to do so by Indigenous leaders, and did not seek any major role in the demonstrations.
On Monday in a courtroom in the small city of Mandan, N.D., jury members are expected to start hearing closing arguments, after which they will consider Greenpeace’s fate.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is ramping up its enforcement of illegal pesticides smuggled through the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, officials said during a visit to L.A. on Thursday.
Since President Trump began his second term in January 2025, EPA has blocked more than 2.4 million pounds of illegal pesticides from entering the country, said Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator. Much of it comes from China, but some comes from Mexico and, on the East Coast, from Africa.
“We’re very alarmed by any chemical that anyone would seek to bring into this country that our own government hasn’t had the opportunity to vet, to research to fully understand,” Zeldin said. “That’s why it’s so important that these products get stopped at the border.”
The announcement came just hours after the Supreme Court handed a major victory to the makers of the weedkiller Roundup, shielding it from thousands of lawsuits from states alleging the company failed to warn people the product could cause cancer.
Speaking from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection warehouse in Carson, Zeldin pointed to a white bottle with a yellow label reading “SNIPER” — an illegal pesticide product commonly imported from abroad and sold online — that was recently intercepted at the Port of L.A. complex. Sniper contains dichlorvos, or DDVP, a highly toxic insecticide that is not registered or approved for use in the U.S. It is known to cause neurological problems, convulsions and comas, with children particularly at risk.
Illegal pesticides are cause for concern in California, where they are often associated with illegal cannabis operations. Last year, Siskiyou County declared a local emergency in response to the “escalating threat” posed by illegal pesticides, often fumigants, in illicit cannabis operations.
“These chemicals, when burned, create thick, poisonous smoke that presents serious risks to public health, the environment, waterways, and first responder safety,” the county said.
A 2024 Los Angeles Times investigation found that contraband Chinese pesticides used on cannabis farms is a growing problem in the state.
Customs and Border Protection seized containers of an illegal pesticide from China that were packed with legitimate items.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Much of the illegal product comes through the ports of L.A. and Long Beach, which together handle more than 30% of the nation’s container traffic, officials said. EPA works closely with Border Patrol officials, who flag suspicious cargo containers at the port for further inspection.
CBP spokesman Jaime Ruiz said the agency is using artificial intelligence tools to help scan incoming cargo manifests for potentially illegal items. Thousands of containers are flagged for inspection each year, although that number also includes drugs, counterfeit goods and other contraband in addition to pesticides, he said. He could not immediately say what percentage were illegal pesticides.
Illegal pesticides have at times been found in California agriculture and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation has taken enforcement action against violators. The DPR operates one of the nation’s largest pesticide residue testing programs, analyzing some 3,500 produce samples each year from wholesale and retail stores and other outlets. The state produces about half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.
Jeff Hall, assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance, said the issue should be bipartisan.
“We cannot allow foreign actors to profit by sending toxic and poisonous products into the United States and poisoning American communities,” he said. “This is a message that we should all be able to agree on, especially for pesticides.”
However, the agency’s visit to L.A. arrived at a fractured moment for U.S. pesticide regulation and for the Trump-aligned Make America Healthy Again movement.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Bayer’s Monsanto, the maker of the powerful weedkiller Roundup, shielding it from thousands of state lawsuits that allege the company failed to warn people the product could cause cancer.
Roundup contains glyphosate, which was classified by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015. But the Supreme Court found that the company can’t be sued in state courts because federal agencies — including the EPA — have determined that it’s not likely to cause cancer in humans when used as directed. The EPA has repeatedly approved a label for the product without a cancer warning.
“When people are exposed to pesticides, they deserve honest warnings about the risks,” said Bill Jordan, former deputy director of EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, in a statement. “The Court’s decision leaves families, workers, and communities with fewer tools to protect themselves and to recover damages when they are injured by a pesticide.”
For the third year in a row, accidental drug-related overdose and poisoning deaths have dropped in Los Angeles County, a decline officials attribute to ongoing investments in prevention and harm reduction resources countywide.
There were 2,298 accidental drug overdose and poisoning deaths in 2025, down 6%, a relatively small drop from 2,438 the prior year but an overall substantial reduction from the all-time high of 3,220 deaths countywide in 2022, according to a recent report from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
Drug overdoses continue to be the leading cause of accidental deaths countywide — surpassing the deaths due to vehicle crashes and firearms in 2017 combined — with methamphetamine and fentanyl most often involved in the overdoses.
The problem reached a historic high in 2022 when fentanyl surpassed methamphetamine as the most common drug listed as a cause of overdose deaths. At the time, the number of overdoses in general had increased across the board.
However, these accidental deaths have been on a downward trend, with a nearly 30% overall decrease in drug-related overdoses from 2022 to 2025. Fentanyl-related deaths dropped by 40% and methamphetamine-related deaths declined by 25% in that period.
Officials said in the report that the numbers are more modest compared with 2024, when accidental overdose deaths plunged overall by 22%, which they said “demonstrates sustained progress in the County’s efforts to address the overdose crisis.”
“Three consecutive years of fewer overdose deaths in LA County is proof that sustained investments in prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery services saves lives,” Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, said in a statement.
Ferrer credited the continued reduction to outreach workers and community partners who “are working every day to connect people to treatment, distribute lifesaving naloxone and meet people where they are without judgment.”
The department continues to invest in a coordinated spectrum of community-based overdose prevention efforts that include the Fentanyl Frontline — a multimedia campaign focused on the widespread distribution of naloxone — and ByLAforLA.org, a community-powered platform that connects residents to lifesaving services with an aim to reduce stigma.
The health department report also found:
- Los Angeles County overdose deaths declined across most age groups in 2025 but deaths among adults 65 and older increased by 14%.
- Although older adults accounted for only 11% of all overdose deaths, this increase contrasts with the broader downward trend observed across other age groups, according to the report.
- Those aged 40 to 64 remained the most affected group, accounting for 53% of overdose deaths last year.
- Communities with 30% of residents living below the federal poverty level had a higher rate of drug overdose deaths than areas with less than 10% of families living below the federal poverty level.
- By race, Black residents continued to experience the highest overdose death rates in 2025.
- By gender, a persistent disparity remains, with men accounting for most overdose deaths, nearly 1,800 compared with more than 500 deaths among women.
Nationwide, opioid overdose deaths have been on the decline since mid-2023, driven largely by decreases in fentanyl-related deaths, but the numbers remain above pre-pandemic levels, according to a recent report by KFF, a national health policy organization.
KFF said multiple policy actions have contributed to the decline, including efforts to expand access to treatment as well as overdose-reversal drugs and public awareness campaigns. At the federal level, there have been some efforts to mitigate the crisis including improving fentanyl detection at ports and borders.
“Despite progress, a range of more recent federal policy actions may affect future trends, including federal budget cuts, federal staffing reductions, and cuts to federal grants that support state and local programs; reduced Medicaid and Marketplace coverage; and a shift toward a more enforcement-focused approach, including the designation of illicit fentanyl as a ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction,’” according to the report.
Los Angeles County residents can access assistance for substance-use services 24 hours a day, seven days a week by calling (800) 854-7771, select Option 2 after the language prompt.
Tens of thousands of people in southeast Los Angeles County have been engulfed in a dense cloud of smoke for nearly a week as a fire continues to tear through a massive refrigerated warehouse in Boyle Heights. Toxic air has covered the San Gabriel Valley and beyond at times, as the fire continues to burn and the wind shifts the pall in different directions.
People have reason to be concerned about their loved ones breathing in the plume, experts say.
“There’s no safe level of exposure to particle pollution,” said Will Barrett, assistant vice president for nationwide clean air policy at the American Lung Assn.
Soot can be deadly. The charred microscopic particles can travel deep into a person’s lungs and bloodstream, causing swelling and triggering heart attacks and strokes.
People aren’t just being exposed for hours. They’ve been exposed for days in Boyle Heights, unincorporated East Los Angeles, Maywood, Montebello and Bell, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
“There are some pollutants where just breathing in a little bit of it can cause some serious issues for people,” said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician with Kaiser Permanente. He said he’s most concerned about particles, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and chemical gases from incinerated insulation, plastics and paint in the smoke.
“Those chemicals can cause irritation in the lungs, they can cause long-term lung damage, and sometimes they can even cause cancer,” he said. “I also worry about children, because children breathe in more air per volume of their body than adults do and they tend to be more active.”
“People also need to remember that even if you are healthy, these chemicals are going to put you at risk. It’s not just people who are vulnerable, anyone is in danger.”
The fact that the smoke continues to billow into the sky for a sixth day matters, said Jill Johnston, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at UC Irvine. “The longer the exposure time, the more dose you’re getting, or the more potential chemicals that you’re inhaling. So you’re gonna be increasing a potential risk,” she said.
Pregnant women and their babies in utero are known to be vulnerable to smoke from wildfires, she said. But less is known about city fires. “We see increased risk of low birth weight and preterm birth connected to exposure to wildfire smoke. This isn’t exactly the same composition of smoke, but would anticipate … there could be potentially similar risk.”
A fire like this can leave people with no good choices. They can stay home with an air filter if they have one. But homes need “fresh” air, and a fire can make getting that impossible.
For that reason, some people believe that the official response to the gravity of the fire at Lineage Logistics has been inadequate. Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics, is among several activists who criticized the Los Angeles Fire Department and city officials who appeared to downplay health risks from prolonged smoke, and ultimately decided against evacuating these areas. They think many more people should have been evacuated.
“They always under-warn, they under-evacuate, they bring people back too fast,” Williams said. “I get that there’s a societal desire to return to normalcy.”
Local officials have opened a pair of shelters to house residents who want to temporarily relocate. The Los Angeles Unified School District also canceled summer programming for schools in the smoke-affected communities.
But “there is nothing in the air that is so dangerous that we have to do evacuations or even shelter in place,” LAFD Chief Jaime Moore said. Asked at a recent news conference whether the air was dangerous, Mayor Karen Bass said, “not to the extent that required a mandatory evacuation.”
Yet Williams pointed to the burning chemical-laden insulation foam inside the building, which could release several other highly toxic gases, including hydrogen cyanide, an asphyxiating gas, and isocyanates, chemical vapors that can cause serious lung damage.
“It’s about what you value and who you value,” Williams said. “If you value truth, you cannot sit there in front of a burning building and say the air is safe.”
A Fire Department spokesperson declined to comment when asked why the department considered a shelter-in-place order more appropriate than issuing an evacuation. It’s not clear that evacuation would have been purely a city responsibility. Lineage Logistics sits along the city boundary, with unincorporated Los Angeles County and other cities nearby.
mark! Lopez, a community organizer with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, also said the recently lifted shelter-in-place orders were not enough to protect residents from the heavy smoke and potential chemical releases. Residents, he said, have complained about smoke seeping into homes through cracks in doorways and windows, giving them sore throats and breathing problems.
Lopez said many of the smoke-affected communities have long suffered from poor air quality from decades of heavy polluting industrial facilities, highway traffic and rail yards. He said the public statements from Fire Department and elected officials that cast doubt on the risks from smoke were unacceptable.
“This is what happens when the Fire Department says there’s not a threat to human health. … The LAFD, they aren’t public health experts.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
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